Re: The 'working poor' scam

From: sinister (sinister_at_nospam.invalid)
Date: 06/26/04 

Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 07:33:59 GMT

"Jim Blair" <see@sig.com> wrote in message
news:cbcmq6$m3e$1@news.doit.wisc.edu...
> Robert Vienneau <rvien@see.sig.com> wrote:
> >In article <cb9h09$115$1@news.doit.wisc.edu>, Jim Blair <see@sig.com>
> >wrote:
> >
> >> "sinister" <sinister@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> >Right-wingers like Cox, Alm, and Hubbard, on the other hand, *have*
> >> >produced
> >> >biased estimates.
>
> Jim Blair:
> >
> >> ??? By NOT excluding the most mobile age groups?
>
> Robert Vienneau:
> >
> >Mr. Blair makes *** up.
> >
> >Hubbard, for example, excluded individuals whose income mobility
> >was sufficiently drastic downward.
>
> Hi,
>
> ???? And where did you learn that? He "excluded" only people that could
> not have been included because they had not filed with the IRS in both of
> the years that he studied: namely: 1979 and 1988. Since he used IRS
> data, those exclusions were incorporated in the study design.
>
>
> >...His results were biased
> >upward.
> >
>
> It is not clear which way that biases the result. For example an athlete
> who was making millions a year at age 25 in 1988 would likely be excluded
> because he didn't file as a high school student in 1979.

<yawn> Uh...it's pretty clear that it biases the result upward:

"But this report was based on what we may charitably call a strange
procedure. Here's what Hubbard's report did: it tracked a group of
individuals who paid income taxes in all ten years from 1979 to 1988, and
compared their incomes not with each other but with those of the population
at large. The restriction to individuals who paid taxes in all years
immediately introduced a strong bias toward including only the economically
successful; only about half of families paid income taxes in all ten years.
This bias toward the successful was apparent in the fact that by the end of
the sample period the group contained very few poor people and a lot of
affluent ones: indeed, only 7 percent of the sample were in the bottom
quintile by the sample's end, while 28 percent were in the top quintile.
More important, by comparing the sample with the population at large rather
than with each other, the report essentially treated the normal tendency of
earnings to rise with age as representing social mobility. The median age of
those whom the study classified as being in the bottom quintile in 1979 was
only twenty-two."

(from http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/therich.html )

>
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